Australian online electronics retailer Kogan says Microsoft Corp. (NYSE: MSFT) rectified an issue that knocked the company's home page off the Seattle-based software giant's Bing search engine.

"Microsoft/Bing has contacted us. They escalated the issue to their engineers to the U.S., who have found an error at their end, which has now been rectified," said Ruslan Kogan, founder and CEO of Kogan.com, in an email sent late Wednesday night.

The issue affected the company's presence on Yahoo Inc.'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) search engine, too, due to a partnership with Microsoft that includes using overlapping technologies to drive both search engines.

Kogan's technical team noticed a steep dropoff in traffic from Bing and Yahoo on Sunday. They discovered that a search for the company's name did not produce the company's main Australian home page; typically when a search for a company's name is queried, it shows up at the top or near the top of the search results. Kogan's site appeared normally on competing search engines.

The company was concerned that its tongue-in-cheek campaign to get customers to update their Internet Explorer or suffer a 6.8 percent levy before checkout had something to do with the disappearance of the company's main site that had the so-called IE7 tax.

Microsoft said on Monday its search engine results are not "editorialized" -- meaning that human engineers do not tinker with search results. Search engine providers are sensitive to these type of insinuations, because the integrity of the services' commercial brands is that results are not edited by humans but rather based solely on impartial algorithms that produce results based on the ebb and flow of global search queries, mainly based on the popularity of sites in relation to the search terms used to get to them.

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